A Cocktail with the President of Sony

I was lucky enough to be invited to a very intimate cocktail with the president of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, David Bishop, at last week CES 2007 in Las Vegas. While I’m still not sure why I was personally invited in the first place, I appreciated the opportunity to get closer to one of the key player in the Blu-ray – HD DVD war.

Newly in place at the head of Sony, the president was a very kind man who answered a few of my questions like if I was the NYT. I had a few concerns about how movie downloading could affect HD physical media on the long run. He’s answer to that was unclear but he told me that Sony already made an offer for their catalog to Steve Jobs and his iTunes Store but Mr. Jobs turned down the offer because of the price asked by Sony. According to David Bishop, Apple has a focus on the hardware and is not committed to bringing value to the content.

I also meet a couple of VPs, including the “flamboyant” and dynamic, Fritz Freidman, senior vp of worldwide publicity, who I guess he’s first goal in meeting with bloggers like me, was to understand who we are and how Sony can get their message to us without fear of major distortion like we often see on blogs and forums.

We had fun, the wine was good and the food was excellent. I returned to my hotel with a Blu-ray laptop bag with three Blu-ray movies which I should do a review pretty soon.